Julian Kossoff is a senior editor for Telegraph.co.uk. He is an award-winning journalist who has written extensively on race and religion.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews are holding Israel to ransom

My grandfather was an Orthodox Jew by faith. By profession he was a baker who rose at 4 am every morning, apart from the Sabbath, to go to work.

Born in a Fiddler on the Roof-style village ruled by the Tsar, he was more than familiar with the deeply religious world of the ultra-Orthodox Jews – a disparate group of sects, dynasties, schools of thought and beliefs now collectively known as the Haredi. Many were eternal students spending their days studying Torah and praying in the yeshiva, and grandpa had only contempt for their aversion to honest toil.

Indeed, there's a family anecdote about him en route to a Zionist rally shortly after World War Two when he was buttonholed by one of the men in black, wheedling for a donation. An angry exchange ensued, there was a flash of my patriarch's Russian temper, and with side-curls flying the unfortunate fellow was sent sprawling on the London pavement. "Parasite!" declared Mr Kossoff Snr.

Last week he issued a warning aimed at the Haredi. “We can’t have an ever-increasing proportion of the population continuing to not go to work. By the time you are up to 10 percent of the population of whom 70 percent of the male part of the population doesn’t work, you are getting to a macroeconomic issue,” he said.

Arrangements have to be made to force them into work, said Fischer – and fight, your average Israeli would add. When the first Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion allowed a few hundred religious students exemption from the IDF, he could not have imagined entire divisions of young men would now avoid the draft.

Military service and paying tax may be duties of citizenship the Haredi manage to dodge, but they never fail to miss out on voting. As they expand, they are able to lever growing political power and raise ever greater state subsidies for their communities. And if they don't get their way legally, they will orchestrate a mini-religious riot, something that now flares with ever greater frequency.

Change will come, said Mr Fischer, but the question is whether it would happen in social conflict, in political conflict, or consensually and constructively.

Unfortunately, the Haredi don't do consensus.

Beyond their closed world there is nothing else of interest – no art, no science, no culture, no history, no innovation, no progress. Six billion other human beings are lumped together as the goyim, while secular Jews are heretics and sell-outs whose remaining use is via their wallets to profer a donation born out of Judaic nostalgia.

The Haredi believe this world is a phase for the next life in heaven and the only way to get into heaven is by knowing Torah, etc. Better still, the Haredi's devotion and piety will hasten the arrival of the Messiah – heaven on earth – and thus they like to believe they're "working" for a mankind that they currently want nothing to do with.

All the average Haredi needs is a good woman who will work, tend to the house and bear as many children as God sees fit to "bless" them with. By doing so, she allows him to worry only about Torah and thus he buys a ticket to heaven for both of them.

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, Mr Fischer declared: “If something is not sustainable it will stop. This is not sustainable."